Alan Bresgi is Head of People Engagement at Rothmans, Benson & Hedges – A subsidiary of Philip Morris International. Allan talks to us about why they needed a platform to connect with their employees that went a step further than legacy communication tools that were being used previously. He sheds light on how they were able to drive engagement by analyzing engagement analytics and employee satisfaction.
Q1. Tell us a bit about Rothmans, Benson & Hedges and your role over there.
My name is Alan Bresgi, I am Head of People Engagement at Rothmans, Benson & Hedges and we’re a fully owned subsidiary of Philip Morris International. We are the largest tobacco company in Canada and since 2017 and we’ve been recognized as one of the greater Toronto area’s top employers. Currently with about 800 employees. Our parent company Philip Morris International is the world‘s largest leading tobacco company. But currently, we are all focused on the development and commercialization of smoke-free reduced-risk products and ultimately it’s a vision to achieve a smoke-free future for Canadians by 2030.
So the app that we use is HubEngage and when I joined the RBH about three years ago one of the first things that I noticed was the huge gap in our internal communications. Really all we had was emails, Skype, and quite an old legacy internet system that really wasn’t being used by anybody so I was looking for a tool that could effectively connect our employees, was intuitive, fun, scalable and of course, it had to be mobile as well. So HubEngage was a platform through which we felt that employees could start connecting directly with each other while also allowing us to consolidate some of the important links that we have in the organization as well as becoming a central hub for all other kinds of information so in many ways, it almost became the internet that we didn’t have.
So typically we use HubEngage as a primary communication tool and now it’s involved in many of the activities that we have. So for example when we do a product launch we want to solicit feedback or comments from employees. So for example in one of our product launches, we had a full sort of education and communications campaign to inform employees about the products that we were launching and it also had sort of a competitive aspect to it in which employees were asked to do different kinds of tasks and they would receive rewards for that and so we used HubEngage as a way to communicate, track and display all of the activity that was done In that initiative. One of the other features of HubEngage that I think was really beneficial to us is the ability to geo-fence communications and target very specific groups within our organization and that’s particularly helpful for things like competitive types of either communications or training.
We derived a lot of value from your back office analytics, which was really a major factor in our consideration of whether to go with a platform like HubEngage or someone else. Being able to have access to the diagnostics to really understand how the organization is using the tool and how we can better use the tool, as a result, to drive communications and engagement that we need so that diagnostics is really an important consideration for us.
The experience of working with the whole HubEngage team has been really fantastic. I think we’ve had extremely good two-way communication with yourselves and I’ve found you always very open and receptive to our feedback on the functionality. Particularly if we had some suggestions for something that wasn’t yet included in the system or something that perhaps we felt needed to be tweaked a little bit, the support was always there I think you listen very closely. Very often the suggestions we made appeared in some of the updates that came out shortly after that. And certainly, we appreciated all of the support that we got from you with the training initially I think we leaned on you quite a lot to learn about how to use the system and as we got more confident, more comfortable with it I think we had an opportunity to dialogue with you and your trainers on how to use much more advanced features of the platform which really enhanced ability to communicate with the whole organization.
